Let your pile of small good things grow
This is a written excerpt of Rest & Recreation, a companion to Routines & Ruts conversations podcast. Each week, host Madeleine Dore shares reflections from previous interviews and interesting reads to offer you a moment of R&R. Listen on Apple iTunes, Spotify and others.
Words by Madeleine Dore
I have a keyring that says, “Let your pile of good things grow”
It was a serendipitous gift from the lovely people at CreativeMornings, and taken from a quote by Rainbow Rowell that says:
“So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.”
Trying to solve our entire lives or comprehend the magnitude of circumstances and injustices outside of our control can be overwhelming.
But often there is a small, good thing we can do to help ourselves and others. When our days have been upended and narrowed to varying degrees and ways, when we feel restless, uncertain, disheartened, this notion of adding good things, just one at a time, can be a comfort.
So what is a good thing? Often it’s something small. As author and poet Eliza Cook said, “take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves."
It feels doable to fill a minute. It feels almost tangible—you can see a minute in a way you can’t see a day or the next week or the next month. And it’s a comfort to think small—to postpone the big, stifling plan for a moment, and just do something good with the minute.
So I recently made a list of all the things I can start in a minute that don’t add to overwhelm: journalling, chopping vegetables to make a soup, taking a nap, mopping the floor, tidying my desk, making a snack, reading, tweezing my eyebrows, listening to a song, moving, calling a friend, sitting, putting on a podcast.
Looking at this list, I saw they are all small joys - they are my small good things for my pile. It’s a comfort to know that in the next minute, I could pull something from my list and begin. This list of small good things also have something else in common.
Often, a small good thing is ordinary.
We often overlook the ordinary, but it can be where we connect to ourselves.
Connecting to the ordinary is embracing that we don’t have to do everything, we don’t have to do something extraordinary right now, we don’t have to think big. We can focus on a small, ordinary, good thing.
I’m reminded of the wonderful essay by Mike Powell an ode to washing the dishes about how most of life is ordinary. Powell writes:
“Ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the bubbles and the steady passage from dish to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly, the breath of actual time, a reality that lies dormant and plausible under all the clutter we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indecipherable call to another bird, a song from a passing car warps in the Doppler effect and I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I need a lot less than I think I do and that I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.”
It’s often the bumps with the small, ordinary things that bring us extra-alive. So often I catch myself wanting more, more, more, but then there are these encounters with the ordinary where it all feels like enough, a bump that brings you back to yourself. That’s what I suppose I find extraordinary in the routine—the jolting moments of being extra-alive amongst a string of groundhog days.
So I suppose that’s another thing that these small, good, ordinary things share –when they form a pile, they create a ballast against the chaos, the bedrock.
This is especially true when we compile small good ordinary things from various parts of our lives.
When I interviewed Benjamin Law for season one of Routines & Ruts, he was saying that it’s important to have many different goals in our lives so when one ends the ballast remains:
“If we invest our wellbeing into one thing, we forget that there are other, smaller things that are just as important like spending time with your family, exercising, trying out the new recipe that you’ve wanted to try for a really long time.”
These small, good, ordinary things can be what gives us a sense of agency. In a recent essay for the New York Times, I Used to Go Out. Now I Go to The Home Depot, Anne Helen Petersen wrote:
“The pandemic has a way of constantly reminding us that our lives are deeply intertwined. But it also shrinks our daily existences into small, isolating little worlds. Every day presents a new way to feel helpless, a new wrinkle of loneliness. We can’t counter the current risks of the outside world on our own. But we can find agency, even comfort, in their smallness. We can mow our backyards, or even just tend the flowers in our windowsill, and ready them for a time when we can share them — and ourselves — again.”
So, don’t try to solve your whole life, or take the weight of the world on your shoulders alone. Let your pile of small, good, ordinary things grow. When they pile up, slowly, we begin to have something we can stand on, a ballast to steady us in our days—even if just for a minute.